Donald Glover Says He Was Hired on ‘30 Rock’ Because Of A Diversity Initiative: “Tina Fey Said It Herself”

Donald Glover has built a long, award-winning career in music and comedy since he got his start writing on 30 Rock at the young age of 23. But the actor recently spoke on being hired on the show as part of a diversity initiative at NBC, something that Tina Fey herself has confirmed.

“There is no animosity between us or anything like that, but [Tina Fey] said it herself…. It was a diversity thing,” he recently told GQ of his 30 Rock writing gig.

Glover is likely referring to a 2018 profile written about him in The New Yorker, in which the writer spoke to Fey about why she hired him on the show.

The profile says that Glover “noted that his own skin color had surely influenced his career, beginning with his first job, as a writer on 30 Rock.” Glover told The New Yorker, “I wondered, Am I being hired just because I’m black?”

The New Yorker‘s  Tad Friend, who wrote the piece, reported that “Tina Fey, the show’s creator and star, told me that the answer was in large part yes; she admired Glover’s talent but hired him because funds from NBC’s Diversity Initiative ‘made him free.'”

GQ noted that such an initiative allowed the show to hire a Black writer to the writers room without it counting against their budget.

Glover described having “stress dreams” to GQ and experiencing impostor syndrome while working on the show. But 30 Rock star Tracy Morgan took notice of his talent soon after he started.

“The things he wrote for me made me very funny,” Morgan told GQ. “He got me nominated…twice!”

After launching his career on 30 Rock, Glover soon landed his first major acting role in Community. He went on to win multiple Grammy Awards for his hit songs This Is America and Redbone, while his hit FX show Atlanta won multiple Golden Globe and Emmy Awards. And his latest series, Swarm, has quickly become a cult favorite.

“The last two people who were fighting for the job were me and Kenya Barris,” Glover later told GQ. Barris is known for creating the ABC sitcom black-ish and recent Netflix release You People.

He said, “I didn’t know it was between me and him until later. He hit me one day and he was like, ‘I hated you for years!’”